Primeur magazine

Edition: flash - Issue:
2016-07-08

Hardware

IT News Australia reports that Western Australia's Pawsey supercomputing centre is preparing to boost its storage and high-performance compute capabilities in response to the flood of data being generated by radio telescopes and research projects in the country. Pawsey Centre's Schibeci told IT news that in March the HPC capacity of the centre was used up to 97% of capacity.
Read further...

Exascale

With China now on the 1st and 2nd place in the supercomputer TOP500 and having more systems than the US in the list, the US are losing the supercomputer race, says Alex Larzelere on his blog. He gives a list of 5 todos for the US to, once more build the fastest supercomputer in the world: 1. Get serious about catching up; make it a national priority; 2. Boost government funding in support of the National Strategic Computing Initiative; 3. Keep innovating at the national labs; 4. Form more public-private partnerships to help industry; 5. And in an embarrassing role reversal, learn from the Chinese.
Read further...

Lenovo provides some background on the Lenovo NeXtScale system called Phoenix at the University of Adelaide in Australia. The cluster is based on 120 NeXtScale nx360 M5 compute nodes with 3,840 Intel Xeon processors E5-2600 v3 series. The cluster is also equipped with 144 NVIDIA K80 GPUs and 15,360 GB of memory and is connected with Mellanox SB7790 EDR IB interconnect switches. The Phoenix system runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux and benchmarks at 300 Tflop/s.
Read further...

Focus on Europe

"High-performance computing (HPC) isn't just a new technology sector - it's fast becoming a vital part of a diverse range of industries", says Brid-Aine Parnell on the Lenovo Think Progress blog. However, focus in Europe and the UK should be on buying HPC machines for industry, on software development, but not hardware development, she argues: "Providing industrial access to supercomputing should be a top priority for the UK and Europe, not just to improve its competitiveness in the HPC market, but also to ensure the competitiveness of companies in a whole host of other industries."
Read further...